Formed after democracy was restored in Argentina in 1983, the
National Commission on the Disappeared was chartered to
investigate the fates of the thousands who disappeared during the
junta rule. The commission was to receive depositions and
evidence concerning these events, and pass the information to the
courts, in those cases where crimes had been committed. The
commission's report would not extend, however, to determine
responsibility, only to deliver an unbiased chronicle of the
events.

In order to guarantee objectivity, the National Executive
resolved that the commission be comprised of individuals who
enjoyed national & international prestige, chosen for their
consistent stance in defense of human rights. They would
represent different walks of life and political affiliations or
ideologies.

The new president elect of the democratic republic, Dr. Raul
Alfonsin, called upon the following people to carry out their
function independently and ad honorem:

The commission has presided over hearings of thousands of
cases of abduction, disappearance, torture, and executions. Every
individual case was documented in a numbered file. It compiled
over 50,000 pages of documentation [We wish they were made
available digitally over the Internet] A shocking summary was
published as an official report in Spanish in 1984. Faced with
the thousands of testimonies and horrific facts the commission
concluded with a set of reccomendations to pursue legal action
against the responsible.

In an introduction to a book containing the report, Ronald
Dworkin writes [My additions based on the report appear in
brackets]: "Its story has two themes: ultimate brutality and
absolute caprice. People taken off the streets, [from their homes
at night, or from their workplace in broad daylight and driven
blindfolded to detention camps.] Their houses looted and their
property stolen. Most of them lived the rest of their lives in
the detention centers, hooded or blindfolded, forbidden to talk
to one another, hungry, living in filth. The center of their
lives - dominating the memories of those who survived - was
torture. They were tortured, almost without exception,
methodically, sadistically, sexually, with electric shocks and
near-drownings, [some buried to their necks and left in the sun
and the rain for days. They were] constantly beaten, in the most
humiliating possible way, not to discover information - very few
had any information to give - but just to break them spiritually
as well as physically, and to give pleasure to their torturers.
Most of those who survived the torture were killed. Disposing of
the bodies presented a tactical problem. First they were buried
in mass unmarked pits, but later, a more efficient final solution
was discovered. The disappeared were loaded into planes with an
open door, flown over the sea, and then thrown out. Most of them
were first drugged or killed, but some were alive and conscious
when they left the plane."

The report of the commission was published in English with an
introduction by Ronald Dworkin, as a book under the name Nunca
Mas (Never Again), published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New
York. Also published in London by Faber and Faber Ltd, 1986. ISBN
0374223505. While the report explicitly states that the
documented cases are by no means exhaustive, and that many cases
were most probably left unreported, till this date, this report
is the most extensive document available publicly, bringing those
horrors to light.